THE PRINCE OF WALES GOT BACK FROM THE FAR EAST IN July 1922. It was not until April 1925 that he completed his imperial tours with a visit to South Africa. Between those dates, however, he twice visited Canada and once the United States. The second of those two voyages was to prove something of a turning point in his life.
‘I always feel that I have a right to call myself a Canadian because I am, in a small way, a rancher,’ he told the Canadian Club at the end of 1922.1 To the Prince the ranch was more than just a plaything, as her dairy was to Marie Antoinette; it was the only piece of land which he actually owned himself and it represented reality in a world which he found increasingly artificial. He corresponded regularly with the ranch manager, took an intelligent interest in the building up of the stock and prided himself in particular on the excellence of his shorthorns. When he visited Canada in the autumn of 1923 it was above all to inspect his ranch and spend some weeks there.
He could not escape without some junketing in the great cities. ‘The Prince gets here on Tuesday,’ Ernest Hemingway told Ezra Pound from Toronto. ‘Prince Charming, the Ambassador of Empire, the fair haired bugger.’2 There was an awful sameness about the ceremonies, so much so that when a provincial mayor lost a page of his speech and yammered helplessly after: ‘Not only do we welcome Your Royal Highness as the representative of His Majesty the King, but we …’, the Prince obligingly completed the hallowed phrase, ‘also welcome you for yourself’.3 But some events were unscripted. In Quebec he danced all night with an attractive woman, only to discover next morning that she was a journalist from New York. ‘I was had for a mug,’ he told Freda Dudley Ward, ‘but she was quite nice about it and said she wouldn’t say too much despite the fact that she had got off with me. I think she’s a sport.’4 She was, but the Prince was to discover a year later that not all journalists were equally sporting.
There were no journalists on the ranch, and the general public, or what little there was of it in rural Alberta, left the Prince in peace. He threw himself with zest into his role as rancher, riding around the fences of his four thousand acres, inspecting the stock, ordering new equipment. ‘I’ve even helped to muck out the cow house,’ he told the King, ‘and I chop and saw up wood and I can assure you that it’s very hard work indeed.’5 His staff were delighted to see him so contented and harmlessly employed, though less enthusiastic about the nature of their occupations – ‘Our conversation is largely of sheep-dips, shorthorns and stallions,’ Godfrey Thomas reported gloomily.6 Nor did the Prince pretend that it was more than a temporary role: ‘It’s a fine healthy life and a real rest for the brain … But of course one couldn’t stick it for very long.’7
It had been an honour and a joy to entertain him, wrote the Governor General, Lord Byng of Vimy, and the thought that the Prince planned to come again the following year filled him ‘with the pleasantest anticipations’.8 He might have revised his views a year later. In mid-1924 the Prince announced he would visit his ranch again in the autumn, stopping in New York for a few days to watch the international polo. In the event he spent nearly three weeks in New York and less than a week on the ranch. The King had originally wanted Halsey to go on the tour, but the Prince insisted that on a holiday of this kind the Admiral would be superfluous.9 He told his mother that Halsey’s illness prevented him joining the tour, but the Admiral assured the King that he was perfectly fit. ‘What a pity the dear boy should invent a story like that simply because he didn’t want to take him and tell you a regular untruth,’ the King commented to Queen Mary.10 Instead, the Prince was accompanied by Metcalfe and a new recruit to the household, Brigadier G. F. Trotter, known to everyone as ‘G’. Trotter was ‘a wonderful friend and so understanding and sound too’, the Prince told Godfrey Thomas. ‘Thank God I didn’t bring the Admiral. He would have sent me dippy on the voyage, let alone in the States.’11 ‘Sound’ was the last word to describe Trotter. He was, said Bruce Ogilvy, ‘a right old rip’, an amiable roué whose function was to facilitate the Prince’s pursuit of pleasure.12 Everybody liked him; nobody, except perhaps the Prince, trusted him. He and Metcalfe together acted as siren voices leading their master on to ever more perilous rocks. The only voice in the party suggesting that the Prince would do well to plug his ears to their dulcet chorus, or at least bind himself to the mast, was that of the assistant private secretary, Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles – and Lascelles, as the British Ambassador, Esmé Howard, told the King, was ‘excellent in every way but … too young to have any great authority’.13
Long before the visit began there had been suggestions that all would not go easily. Having set up the Prince as an immaculate hero in 1919, the American press was more than ready to redress the balance. In the intervening years the papers had been filled with gossip, linking his name with various women of the demi-monde and, more convincingly, with Mrs Dudley Ward. ‘Quite regardless of the looseness of its own sexual standards,’ wrote the British Ambassador to Curzon in 1922, ‘this country loves to be shocked and pained by what it is pleased to regard as the peculiar licentiousness of Princes, and the Prince was so successful on his visit here that he has naturally made our enemies desirous of showing that he is not what he was thought to be.’ In 1919 society women had gushed about the Prince as a ‘charming boy’, now he had sunk, or perhaps graduated, to the status of ‘a gay young man’.14 Some at least of the journalists who accompanied him when he sailed to New York in the Berengaria seemed intent on reducing him yet further to ‘reckless libertine’. ‘These Yank pressmen are b – s,’ the Prince told Thomas. ‘… one does resent their d – d spying so and they get so tight!! It seems a mean shame having them around when one is on a holiday trip.’15
Unfortunately he gave them plenty of material to work with; beginning with his departure, when he boarded the liner at 2.30 a.m. and kept everybody up awaiting him: ‘a most undignified proceeding,’ the King dubbed it, ‘and then refusing to come on deck or see anyone until she sailed, although thousands of people had come to the docks to see him off, was very rude.’16 Once arrived, he took up residence in the palatial home of Mr James Burden and settled down to divert himself in the intervals of watching polo. There was no shortage of hostesses eager to oblige him; his visit, wrote the columnist Cholly Knickerbocker, became an endurance test, ‘with the bank balances of the refulgent chieftains of the Long Island set pitted against His Royal Highness’s health … Never before in the history of metropolitan society has any visitor to these shores been so persistently and so extravagantly fêted.’17 Over-excited newspaper reports did more than justice to the Prince’s train of life and were forwarded to Buckingham Palace for gloomy perusal.
Nor was it only journalists. An English businessman, unnamed but described by the Prime Minister’s private secretary as ‘an important source in America’, wrote to Downing Street to complain that Metcalfe had arranged for the Prince to be entertained by ‘social outcasts and parvenus’ like Cosden, the oil speculator, and Fleishman, the yeast king. He had insulted one eminent hostess by asking that the Dolly Sisters – ‘notorious little Jewish actresses who have never been received anywhere’ – should be invited to a ball given in his honour, and by failing to attend himself when his request was refused. Twice he had been so drunk in public that he had had to be taken home. The impression he gave ‘was that of a desperately unhappy, wilful, dissipated boy without much brain, who could be very charming when he chose, but who was always seeking to avoid the duties of his position’.18 The businessman was probably Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, who wrote in very similar terms to Lord Stamfordham and was described by the British Ambassador as ‘a tiresome busy-body who cuts no ice’.19 Thomas was shown his letter and replied in fury that it was ‘a tissue of malicious and probably deliberate falsehoods’. Metcalfe had made no arrangements for the visit; the Prince had hardly met Fleishman; he had only made a brief appearance at Cosden’s dance because Mountbatten and the organizer of the British polo team, Lord Wimborne, had asked him to; he had not even known the Dolly Sisters were in New York. The writer of the letter had clearly been affronted because he had himself not been invited to some party.20
Certainly the charges were grossly exaggerated, but the Prince’s hectic hedonism caused some concern to Tommy Lascelles.
[Troubles are beginning,] he told Thomas we hadn’t been in the house two hours before a new comet blazed across our sky and Honey’s wagon was firmly hitched to it. Since then we haven’t seen much of him. The comet, unluckily, is not in the best Long Island constellation; the lorgnettes of the other stars are already fixed on its activities with strong disapproval, and it is of course only a question of time for the telescopes of Hearst to pick it up …
How do you, I wonder, fight against the influence of comets on these occasions? I feel quite powerless. As you know, I’ve always kept as far away as possible from that side of his life, which is certainly no concern of a private secy pur et simple, and only happens to be your concern because, apart from being a p.s., you are also a close friend and adviser of many years standing. But there must come moments … when the private pursuits of comets mess up the ordinary public highway which it is quite definitely the business of the private secy to keep straight and tidy.21
There is no evidence that the Hearst press detected this particular comet, but they made merry with the misfortunes of Metcalfe, who contrived to leave his wallet, containing several letters from the Prince, in the flat of a New York prostitute. ‘Damned old fool,’ commented Lascelles, ‘but it is impossible to be really angry with him, and tho the incident might do the Prince very serious harm, we have all rocked with laughter over it.’22 Though nobody tried to involve the Prince directly, his name was inevitably linked with the resultant scandal – ‘Hard on me,’ he wrote wistfully to Thomas, ‘’cos I was on my best behaviour all the time and avoided the demi-monde like the plague till it became boring.’23 The press did full justice too to the Prince’s decidedly lax church attendance; journalists who had probably themselves not been to a service for years wagged their heads sadly over this delinquency. The whole visit, concluded Stamfordham, ‘has been characterized as one continuous form of recreation and amusement, not altogether devoid of frivolity and with a certain lack of dignity’.24
The Prince would not have rebutted the charges too vigorously; he enjoyed frivolity and attached little weight to dignity. He could justifiably have complained that Stamfordham and the King concentrated on the few bad press reports and ignored the more numerous good ones. Colonel Oscar Solbert, the White House aide attached to the party to help over liaison with the newspapers, concluded that: ‘The general press, particularly outside of New York City, was extremely pro-Prince and was based largely upon the human interest of a young man of his position who was so democratic, so unaffected and so humanly spontaneous.’ The Prince, he believed, had a hold upon public opinion such as ‘no other person has either in or out of our country today’.25 The Prince told his father that the American press worked on different lines to the British and that their sensational stories were forgotten by the following day. ‘The newspaper men hunted me a good deal the first week,’ he wrote, ‘but after that only at intervals and the press was never very nasty and if they were a bit indiscreet sometimes it was more in the nature of ragging me than anything else – they rag everybody, particularly a prince.’26
Things went better after an informal tea party was arranged for seven or eight of the leading editors. Tommy Lascelles admitted that he had been ‘in a muck sweat, feeling rather like Guy Faux’, before the party started, but it had been a ‘howling success’. ‘It was amusing to see how every one of them, even the two Hearst editors, succumbed to him completely after 5 minutes talk.’27 Thenceforward the press said relatively little about his nocturnal revelries and gave reasonable, if at times slightly sardonic, coverage to the items of ‘serious’ sightseeing which the Prince fitted in towards the end of his visit – the offices of the New York Times, a telephone exchange, a school, the Museum of Natural History. More daringly he visited Chicago, heartland of the Hearst press, where the huge German and Irish colonies were expected to ensure a hostile reception – ‘I have never seen a more hearty welcome given to the Prince in any one of the various big towns in England to which I have been with him,’ Lascelles told Queen Mary. ‘During the whole day, I never saw or heard a single sign of unfriendliness.’28
Though the King and Queen grumbled at the publicity given to their son’s activities – they were, said Stamfordham, ‘to say the least of it concerned’29 – they were on the whole restrained in their letters to the Prince. Queen Mary permitted herself one barb: ‘So after all you are only spending a week on your Ranch, what a pity when I thought that was the raison d’être for your going out.’30 The stay at the ranch was in fact something of a disaster. The party arrived under leaden skies with sleet beating against the cars to find the fires smoking and the one living room uninhabitable.31 Next day the sun came out and the spirits of most of the party rose, but not those of the Prince. ‘I had the flu and fever the whole time,’32 he told Thomas, and he remained resolutely gloomy until the time came to move on to Vancouver. There he and General Trotter restored themselves by staying out every night until 6 a.m. The Prince’s behaviour, though perhaps lacking the gravitas desired by his father, was impeccable compared with that of the Lieutenant-Governor, who at the end of a ball at Government House announced to his guest of honour that he was ‘as full as a bloody goat’ and then tumbled flat on his face, destroying a china vessel in his fall.33
The Prince stayed at Ottawa on the return journey. Mackenzie King’s diary describes a row between the Prince and the Governor General, Byng. The Prince was said to have compromised himself with a married woman at a ball in Byng’s residence, Rideau Hall. Next night he announced that he was going to dance at the Country Club. Byng insisted he must come back when the dance ended and not visit any private house. Instead, he went to the home of his new conquest and did not return until breakfast. Furious, Byng said he should never visit Canada again so long as he was Governor General.34 The story is not substantiated by any reference in George V’s papers, even though John Buchan, future Lord Tweedsmuir, was apparently deputed to take the news to Buckingham Palace. Nor did Lascelles refer to the incident, although he wrote an otherwise singularly communicative letter to Legh the day after the dance at the Country Club.35 The Prince could anyway not have visited Canada again before Byng’s retirement in 1926, but when this took place the two men exchanged almost fulsomely friendly letters. Mackenzie King would hardly have made up his conversation with Byng, nor Byng himself been guilty of invention, but it is at least possible that more was made of the affair than it deserved. The King was quite concerned enough without additional causes. He studied a programme of the Canadian visit and gloomily underlined all the dances. ‘Not very wise to go ball dancing on Sunday,’ he wrote in a minute to Stamfordham.36
‘Of course, New York was his undoing,’ was the judgment of Gray Phillips, who was later to be very close to the Prince.37 This seems to be a considerable overstatement. Tommy Lascelles, who was to become one of the Prince’s sternest critics, wrote enthusiastically when the party reached Winnipeg that the Prince was ‘the most wonderful travelling companion and we have the greatest fun together. And I am finding out that he is a much bigger character than I ever expected. From the idiotic Press dope that has appeared during the last 3 weeks you might think that he had done nothing but jazz and ride and flirt … Don’t believe it. He certainly enjoyed himself to the top of his bent, sat up late, and did everything with that super-energy which is merely natural to him … though any hint that he did anything whatever … of which he need be the least ashamed, is utterly false.’ He had, concluded Lascelles, ‘in his own little way, done as much good to the Brit. Emp. as the Baldwin debt-settlement’.38 The statesman and historian, H. A. L. Fisher, was still more emphatic; the Prince of Wales, he maintained, had proved to the American people ‘that a Monarchy is compatible with a democratic State and that the heir to the Monarchy can be as democratic as anyone. I am convinced that this is a great gain.’39 Even the British Ambassador, who had criticized several aspects of the Prince’s conduct, concluded that it was nonsense to say lasting damage had been done. The impression left, he said, was that the Prince was ‘a kindly, simple, unaffected good fellow and a “good sport” – not perhaps over-serious – but then the “people” do not love a “highbrow”’.40 Some even found him serious. Given the role The Times was to play ten years later, it is interesting to find that the man with whom the Prince ‘talked American and English politics vehemently till midnight’ on the return journey across the Atlantic was that journal’s recently reappointed editor, Geoffrey Dawson.41
The importance of the 1924 visit to America was not, as Cunliffe-Owen and a few others suggested, that it demonstrated the Prince’s licentiousness or irresponsibility. What it did demonstrate, however, was the existence of an irreconcilable difference between the Prince and his advisers, which was to prove ever more significant over the next decade. The Prince believed that he had a right to a private life; that what he did with it was his own affair; that if he performed his public duties properly, no one had any business to complain about the rest. His advisers held that there was no such thing as a private life for the heir to the throne, or that if there were it had to be conducted in such cloistered secrecy as to be invisible to the general public. Whenever he could be seen, he was on duty. It was a hard doctrine, and it was one the Prince of Wales was never to accept.
In January 1925 Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, wife of the Governor General of South Africa, Queen Mary’s sister-in-law, and herself a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, wrote to the Queen to pass on some compliments she had heard about the Prince in America. She was sure they would be welcome, she said, ‘because I know how disappointed you were at the time. I hope David will enjoy his time out here, tho’ the programme seems to me a very exhausting one, and he will not find any amusement socially I fear.’42 The Prince of Wales’s visit to South Africa had originally been planned for 1924 but was deferred because of a general election. The pro-British government of General Smuts was defeated by General Hertzog’s Nationalists, and there were doubts about how well the new rulers, the core of whose support consisted of intransigent Boer farmers, would receive their royal visitor. The Prince’s brief was to do what he could to raise the morale of the British element of the population, and, still more important, to reconcile English and Afrikaner, with the Crown as a symbol of South African unity.
The Prince had wanted Metcalfe to accompany him, but was talked out of the idea. With Trotter also absent and Halsey back in charge there was a more businesslike air about the party than had been the case with the recent North American visits. The Prince was on duty and showed his recognition of the fact by inspecting the engine rooms of HMS Repulse three times on the way out, always choosing a particularly hot day and lingering lengthily in the less salubrious compartments.43 Halsey reported that he was keeping himself very much to himself and complaining of being bored, but that he was ‘in better spirits than I have ever known before when leaving on a tour, and he really has been absolutely splendid’.44
There were calls on The Gambia, the Gold Coast and Nigeria on the way south, though the last had to be curtailed because of plague. In The Gambia he caused some confusion by the simplicity of his dress; ‘He no wear feather in for him hat,’ complained one local, comparing him unfavourably with the Governor General.45 The chronicles of those deputed to report the tour abound in such picturesque saws – some genuine, others no doubt conceived in the fertile minds of authors anxious to make their books more entertaining: ‘I lookum proper. He catch young face, old eyes,’ was a remark ascribed to a Nigerian soldier, while an up-country chieftain contributed: ‘A fine boy too much. He open his face plenty to us. He make fine palaver.’46 The heat was appalling, the humidity gross, everyone except the Prince had violent diarrhoea: ‘HRH has seen all there is to be seen, and done all he can do, and done it jolly well,’ wrote Halsey. ‘He has been in the most marvellous form … just like he used to be in the old days.’47
He carried on as he had begun. As if to emphasize that when he had a job of work to do he would do it to the best of his ability, he gave even the most censorious journalist no cause to find fault on the South African tour. His finest hour came forty-eight hours after his arrival in Cape Town, when he spoke at a dinner for both Houses of Parliament. His speech followed predictable lines – the throne, he stressed, stood for ‘a heritage of common aims and ideals shared equally by all sections, parties and nations within that Empire’; unity for the common good was the heart of his message.48 It was drafted by Thomas and Bede Clifford, Athlone’s political secretary, but the Prince had worked over it himself: ‘It was characteristic of his sure appreciation of public sentiment,’ wrote Clifford, ‘that when the speech appeared in the Press next day the headlines and many of the sub-headings were made up from the passages HRH had personally composed.’49 But to his audience the most sensational element of his speech was the fact that he concluded with a few sentences in Afrikaans. In South Africa in 1925 it was almost unheard of for an Englishman to speak a word of Afrikaans. His effort did more to convince the Dutch that he was their Prince as well than would have been achieved by any number of pious platitudes. His words ‘brought the house down’, reported Thomas, ‘and after the actual dinner broke up he was taken charge of by a body of the younger Nationalist members, who sang old Dutch folksongs, and the evening ended with members of Parliament chatting together, who owing to party bitterness had not spoken to one another for years’.50 The younger Nationalists might have been less enthusiastic if they had read the Prince’s letter to his mother, in which he described their language as ‘a patois composed of Dutch, English and Malay, and such bad Dutch that Afrikaans is barely understood in Holland. Of course it’s a farce and no use commercially … and they’ll get over it.’51
After this performance, the word went out throughout the Union that the Prince was a good fellow who deserved a warm reception. ‘The Boers like me to ride into their towns at the head of their commandos, for which performance they generally provide a monstrous stallion with flowing mane and tail,’ the Prince told Lascelles. ‘You would laugh if you could see me.’52 At Bloemfontein he rode in at the head of a commando two thousand strong, alongside ‘General’ Conroy, who had fought for the Boers and in the rebellion during the First World War.53 That same day he visited the memorial to the 27,000 Boer women and children who died during the Boer War: ‘A very bitter reminder really that English and Dutch cannot and will not ever hit it off out here … I do believe that my official tour is helping a bit to tone down this racial feeling, and I’m making a dead set at the Dutch to get in with them.’54 Nobody of any sense, least of all the Prince, imagined that the bitter prejudices of generations could be expunged overnight, but as Godfrey Thomas remarked, ‘they have discovered one thing, that they and the British section … were able to sit on the same platform with a common object – welcoming the P of Wales – and it is a long time since they have done that’.55
It was an uphill struggle, for the Prince privately considered the Boers ‘a sticky, slow, dull, narrow-minded and unattractive race’.56 It was noteworthy how he was preoccupied solely by the relationship between the two white races; the rights of the blacks scarcely occurred to him, or indeed to anybody else in public life. The Prince was racially prejudiced, probably even beyond the norm for his generation. In Sierra Leone, on the journey out, he was disconcerted to find black guests at a dance – ‘tho’ I’ve flatly refused to dance with black women! That’s too much!!’ In the cathedral next day he was still more upset to receive the sacrament from a black priest; for a moment he hesitated, but then decided, as he told his mother, that he ‘couldn’t very well hurry back from the altar at the last moment’.57 In South Africa Bantu, Coloureds, Indians, Malays gave him a tumultuous welcome, and he was touched by it, but he could not conceive the crowds as composed of individuals to whom he could relate. At the best, they seemed picturesque, or perhaps figures of fun, as when Chief Khama at Serowe paraded an army dressed in discarded British uniforms including those of Field Marshals and Admirals of the Fleet: ‘The Prince of Wales,’ wrote Clifford, ‘was probably the first and only British King who will ever be able to boast of being conducted to the Kgotla (native parliament) by a mounted escort wearing kilts.’58 On the one occasion when he delivered a major speech to a black audience – of Zulus and Xhosas at King William’s Town – he warned them solemnly against any tendency to mistrust those in authority.59
It was ‘the most heart-breaking, the most soul-less programme I have ever undertaken’, Thomas told the Queen. The Prince had ‘worked like a slave’.60 Dudley North, another veteran of earlier tours, complained that there was no fun to be had: ‘It is all work and very uninteresting work at that. The dances and evening entertainments so far have been dreadful. There simply isn’t a nice-looking woman in the whole of the Union.’61 To a dog-breeder friend, Millicent Howard, the Prince bemoaned the amount of travel between the various appointments. The tour was ‘more boring and monotonous than strenuous, and I prefer the latter ’cos it keeps you going better’.62 (In the same letter he wrote wistfully: ‘I wish I knew something about Alsacians [sic]. One of my many troubles in life is that I don’t know a thing about anything! I have to be so very promiscuous in my interests.’) There was too little polo, too little golf, too little dancing. When offered bowls as a possible diversion he exclaimed scornfully: ‘Bowls! When I play a game I like to hit something; yes, I want to have a swipe at something.’63 When he contrived to get a game of golf with the Bishop of Bloemfontein he played abominably: ‘However … he exercised the most praiseworthy restraint and, barring a few mild “damns” and “blasts”, there was nothing to which the Bish could take exception.’64
Yet his morale remained resolutely high. ‘I’m so heartily sick of being cheered and yelled and shrieked at, it almost hurts sometimes,’ he complained to Princess Alice,65 but nobody would have suspected it to look at him. He delighted the press correspondents travelling on the royal train by regularly inviting them in for drinks and a sing-song; he would play the ukulele and Thomas a small harmonium.66 ‘I wonder what there is in that young man which attracts one so to him,’ speculated the Minister of Defence, one of the more fervent Labour members in Hertzog’s coalition.67 ‘HRH kept going far better than any of us,’ Thomas told Wigram. ‘He took an infinity of trouble throughout, never really lost his good spirits.’68 Nor was there a trace of scandal on which the journalists could swoop. ‘He has behaved himself like the first gentleman in the land, which he is,’ reported Lord Athlone.69
It helped, of course, that there was little in the way of temptation. Thomas ascribed the Prince’s immaculate good conduct to the fact that he had now adjusted himself to his relatively detached relationship with Freda Dudley Ward and that there were no distracting influences like Mountbatten, Trotter or Metcalfe to lure him from the paths of righteousness.70 To Metcalfe he boasted proudly: ‘I’m keeping the deadly booze well under this trip and the cigs too, so that I really am d—d fit considering. No drinks before 6.0 and only 2 cigs before ten. It was a strain at first but it’s easy now.’71 He still searched for any excuse to postpone going to bed; ‘But one mustn’t find fault with him,’ wrote Legh resignedly, ‘because he really has been perfectly marvellous.’72
The King wrote to congratulate him on his great success. ‘It has certainly been the most strenuous, the most exacting and the most difficult of all your tours. I am astonished that you have been able to have carried through without getting too stale or bored … I hear from all sides the enormous trouble you took to please people, and there is no doubt you gave pleasure to many thousands of people and your visit has done an enormous amount of good.’73 In the six years that he had worked with him, Halsey said, he had never known the Prince so genuinely pleased as he was by this message – ‘that letter has done far more good than the King or anyone else can imagine’.74 The King’s patent pride in his son’s achievements, and the Prince’s pleasure at his father’s praise, show how much latent good will still survived in the relationship. If either of them had been able to demonstrate face to face the warmth and affection that still sometimes permeated their correspondence, then the history of the British monarchy might have been different.
The tour of South Africa was the Prince of Wales’s apotheosis. There were to be many good moments over the next ten years, but never again was he to display his qualities to such great advantage and over so long a period. It was sad that, worn out as he was and longing to be home, he had to append a postscript to the visit and cross the Atlantic to South America.
The tour was formally designated as a return of the visit recently paid by the Argentine President to London, but was really intended to drum up trade in a part of the world where the Americans had largely taken over what had traditionally been a British market. The Prince decided to learn a little Spanish for the occasion, found it gratifyingly easy, and talked it with enthusiasm. Henceforth he was never to miss a chance to air his German and Spanish, showing an equally marked reluctance to embark on French. ‘I’m picking up a little Spanish and tango as well …’ he told his mother from Buenos Aires, ‘– and neither are very difficult.’75 His reception was spectacular, in Buenos Aires particularly where hundreds of thousands of Argentines crammed the streets, shouting ‘Viva el Principe’ and clouds of doves, with their wing tips dyed red, white and blue, were released from the tops of the highest buildings.76
But though to the more remote elements of the public all seemed highly successful, in fact things did not go well. A combination of Latin exuberance and the fatigue caused by the South African tour almost overwhelmed the Prince. ‘I absolutely cannot compete with it all, or be natural or cheerful, when they won’t treat me like a human being,’ he admitted to his mother.77 He had not made a very good impression, Godfrey Thomas told his wife, ‘simply, poor thing, because he has been looking tired and bored all last week, with these interminable pompous functions, and they expect a ‘smiling Prince’. I don’t know what he has to smile about.’78 Wherever he went, whatever he did, he was besieged by a multitude of well-intentioned but oppressive hangers-on. When he paid a ‘private’ visit to an estate some thirty miles from Buenos Aires, sixty-six car loads of officials, police, newspapermen and assorted dignitaries took the road in his wake. ‘I can laugh now,’ he told the Queen after a couple of days recuperating on the Uruguay river, ‘but entre nous I was as near a mental crash on Saty night when I left Buenos Aires as doesn’t matter. I felt crushed by it all.’79 Halsey was so alarmed by his condition that he was on the point of calling off the rest of the tour and returning home. The Prince’s rapid recovery when given a little time by himself encouraged Halsey to carry on, but he still cabled the British Ambassador in Chile, the last country to be visited, insisting that the programme must be cut down.80 The tour was completed, but the Prince was noticeably the worse for wear. An American officer who saw him during the visit described how: ‘Talking to people he hung his head, mumbled, tugged at his cuffs or toyed with his necktie or his fly. He smoked cigarettes incessantly, with nervous little gasps. He was boredom personified – restless, impatient to be away.’81
And so, on 16 October 1925, the Prince returned home after completing the last of his great international tours. There was to be much travelling in the future, but nothing on the scale of these arduous peregrinations. In the course of them he had visited forty-five different countries and colonies and travelled 150,000 miles. Since the war he had spent thirty months abroad; since the beginning of 1915 less than a third of his life had been passed in Britain. It was high time he learned to know his country, and his country him.